Yay.

Had to reconfigure Apache, which was choking under the load. Bloody Apache 1.3. Bloody CPanel. Grrr.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:16 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:08 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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All that memory should either be used by programs or for caching files. If there's 500 megabytes free, that means that 500 megabyes of memory was being used by programs that have now exited. The only thing that should be using 500 megabytes of memory is the MySQL server, and that (for obvious reasons) should not exit.

One big culprit is Movable Type. On our database, the MT comment script can use 60MB of memory; the search script used 300MB until I replaced it. A spamming run can easily fire up ten comments simultaneously (since they are not only extraordinarily inefficient in terms of memory use, but also in terms of speed). Then Fluffy kills them, and I'm left with a 600MB hole unaccounted for.

Another one is the Analog web stats package. I've just disabled it system-wide because it was using 300MB of memory to produce the stats for a single web site. (I've forgotten which one, but not one of the big ones like Ace or the Jawas.)

And then there's Apache. Leave it alone on a server with PHP and CGI and all kinds of other crap running, and you'll soon find individual Apache worker processes using 40 to 60MB each. If you have a hundred of those, that's 4 to 6GB of memory gone, which is probably more than you actually have.

Of course, if you're not running CPanel, you're probably running something reasonable like Apache 2.2 or lighttpd or, well, anything other than Apache 1.3.

Anyway, something is flushing useful data out of memory, and something is slowing down my blog, and I think it's the same something.

So until morale improves I'll be lining the suspects up against the wall and shooting them one by one.

(Minx itself is an interesting case. It's using 152MB of virtual memory for 10 threads, but only 15MB of that is resident. Why it does this I don't know, but unless I enable Psyco, the resident size never increases.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:12 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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They show up, download 5GB from a website that only has 300MB worth of files, and disappear.

Sure, I now have 4TB of bandwidth to play with, but that doesn't mean I'm happy for these idiots to just burn through it like that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:29 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I'm assuming that they're banking on a 100:1 oversell - which is probably reasonable. I wonder what they would do if I actually started using that 2TB every month...

Update: Seek and ye shall find. Dreamhost blog: The Truth About Overselling.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:55 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Disk drives are not supposed to go "beep".

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:18 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:50 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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